Description of the thesis topic

Foams are made of liquid or solid containing gas bubbles. Liquid foams have numerous liquid-gas interfaces, so their structure and dynamics are ruled by liquid surface tension. Solid foams are porous materials used for properties like lightness, low thermal conductivity or permeability. Solid foams are generally elaborated from liquid foams that solidify, and the intermediate solidifying foams have intriguing properties ruled both by surface tension and bulk elasticity. In particular, liquid foams age due to a process called coarsening; foam solidification will arrest this process, but we do not know exactly when and how.

The objective of the PhD project is thus to investigate the rheology and the structure of solidifying foams made from a plaster reactive suspension. We will monitor the foam evolution upon solidification using three different techniques: 1) Raman spectrometry to follow the corresponding chemical reaction, 2) rheology to follow the change in mechanical properties (elastic modulus and yield stress) and 3) video imaging to characterize the foam structure (statistics for bubble size, number of neighboring bubbles, etc.).

Work Context

The PhD will take place in Institut Lumière Matière, a lab depending from CNRS and University Claude Bernard Lyon 1, located in Villeurbanne. The project is hosted in the Liquids and Interfaces team of ILM and involves a collaboration with the SOPRANO team. The PhD will be funded by ANR, in the context of the project ABC2FOAM, in collaboration with LPS Orsay and MATEIS (INSA Lyon), where short stays are expected during the PhD. We are looking for a candidate with a taste for experiments, ideally with a background in soft matter physics or fluid mechanics.